Author's archive
Hoist on His Own Petard 0
Donald Trump chose to start a was–I guess because that’s what despots do–and now he finds himself dire straits, in particular, in particular, the Straits of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb.
“History Does Not Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes”* 0
Jackie Calmes hears a rhyme. A snippet; go read the rest.
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*Mark Twain.
The Name Gamers 0
Ring of Fire’s Josh Gay discusses the TV show South Park’s renaming.
Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Not So Much. 0
A competent therapist? At the Psychology Today website, Marty Klein explains why, as a machine, it isn’t and can’t be. Here’s a bit of his article (emphasis added):
On the other hand, a more complex position is “AI is a consumer product designed by private businesses to make money. It isn’t objective (not to mention that it makes mistakes). It doesn’t know or care about me personally, although it “talks” to me as if it does (that’s the product).” As AI gets increasingly sophisticated, it becomes harder to remember this, which means it becomes increasingly influential in the user’s life.
Red Scare Redux 0
Michael in Norfolk suggests that
Follow the link for his reasoning.
Shills 0
Last night, an app on my phone prompted me to install Polymarket.
As I have no desire to find myself somewhere down the road attending GA meetings, I declined.
I find it saddening that this app, which I’ve used for years, is now shilling for sharks.
And this growth in online gambling does not cast a positive light on the perspicacity of the populace.
Barnum was wrong.
There’s more than one born every minute.
Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Not So Much. 0
Compassionate? El Reg reports
Researchers affiliated with Compassion Aligned Machine Learning (CaML) and the University of Warwick in the UK set out to measure the extent to which AI models demonstrate compassion. They describe their work in a preprint paper titled “HarvestBench: Measuring Whether LLM Agents Will Pay to Avoid Killing Animals.”
Follow the link for more about their experiments.
An Inquiring Mind Wants To Know . . . . 0
Sara Pequeño has a question:
Follow the link to see why she asks it.
Lies and Lying Liars 0
Michael in Norfolk offers a litany of Trumped-up tales.
The Merry-Go-Round 0
George Santayana famously said,
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Via the Miami Herald, Jackie Calmes offers evidence that Santayana was right.
The Rule of Lawless, Republican Thought Police Dept. 0
Thom discusses how the Trump maladministration is intentionally misinterpreting the equal time rule so as to exercise its freedom of repress (before moving on to a couple of other equally vile items).